Where Love Goes

Rating:
Summary: how to find out more about joyce maynard and her work
Review: I want to alert Amazon browsers to the existence of my new website, which features excerpts of my novel, as well as a discussion forum I check into daily, information about the Where Love Goes soundtrack CD, and much more. Find me at www.joycemaynard.com. I'd love to hear from you

Rating:
Summary: PASSIONATE
Review: Joyce Maynard is a gifted writer and I have been avidly following her works for years. This novel does not fail to hold the readers' interest.

As sympathetic as the central adult characters Claire and Tim are, they show a serious relationship from all angles. We see the love, the strong sexual attraction and lastly, the lack of judgment when they are loud enough to awaken Tim's daughter during a romantic moment. One cannot help but wonder if Claire and Tim wanted to get caught, at least on a subliminal level. Claire seems to keep wearing the hairshirt about her sexuality and feels it is disloyal to her children if she becomes involved with a man other than their father.

Claire is an adult, she is no longer married and therefore has no conjugal responsibility to her former spouse. Their relationship has changed because of this. Tim is her lover and as an adult who is in the prime of her life, sexually and otherwise, there is no reason to believe that a healthy normal woman would not want to be involved in a loving, romatic relationship with a caring partner. That is not implausible. It is that very need that makes the average reader able to identify with Claire and Tim and hope that their relationship will work out.

The book is tasteful, thought provoking and extremely well written. It is one that will leave you with bittersweet memories and is well worth the read.

Rating:
Summary: PASSIONATE
Review: Joyce Maynard is a gifted writer and I have been avidly following her works for years. This novel does not fail to hold the readers' interest.

As sympathetic as the central adult characters Claire and Tim are, they show a serious relationship from all angles. We see the love, the strong sexual attraction and lastly, the lack of judgment when they are loud enough to awaken Tim's daughter during a romantic moment. One cannot help but wonder if Claire and Tim wanted to get caught, at least on a subliminal level. Claire seems to keep wearing the hairshirt about her sexuality and feels it is disloyal to her children if she becomes involved with a man other than their father.

Claire is an adult, she is no longer married and therefore has no conjugal responsibility to her former spouse. Their relationship has changed because of this. Tim is her lover and as an adult who is in the prime of her life, sexually and otherwise, there is no reason to believe that a healthy normal woman would not want to be involved in a loving, romatic relationship with a caring partner. That is not implausible. It is that very need that makes the average reader able to identify with Claire and Tim and hope that their relationship will work out.

The book is tasteful, thought provoking and extremely well written. It is one that will leave you with bittersweet memories and is well worth the read.

Rating:
Summary: Why Not Sex and Motherhood?
Review: Through six seasons during her thirty-ninth and fortieth years, we follow Claire, a divorced mother of two teens, who fantasizes about meeting a passionate man in the supermarket. Still mooning over Mickey, the 1st man since her ex-husband to really love her, she meets Tim, a biologist and loving father of a troubled eight-year-old girl. She tries to add the role of passionate lover to her already demanding roles as director of a children's museum (which frankly didn't seem demanding enough) and doting supermom. Instead of becoming one big fantasy family, as Claire had hoped, both sets of children refuse to accept the new situation. When Tim's daughter begins causing trouble for Claire's son, Claire believes her role as loyal mother is being threatened by her role as sexual woman. Claire gives in to her Martha Stewart-complex and goes back to being a supermom. Although Claire's crisis is the heart of the book, her idea of a sexual woman is set up in such ridiculous and unrealistic terms, we're not surprised she gives it up. By sneaking over to his house while her children sleep, Claire goes to great lengths to hide from her children the fact that she is having sex with Tim almost every night. But once she gets in bed with Tim, the only kind of sex they seem able to have is a tirelessly steamy, teenage variety. They make enough noise for his daughter to hear them through her wall, thereby setting in motion their demise. It never occurred to Claire to try for some kind of compromise. Couldn't she have adjusted her expectations, found some alternative to completely joining the two families? Couldn't the lovebirds have toned down their sexual antics, even temporarily? With our sympathy for Claire in jeopardy, it did not help that Tim's character was so wildly limited, progressing from smitten softie to spineless doormat. Were we supposed to believe that Ursula's unhappy personality was the sole result of Tim's flawed parenting? That those who know how to parent correctly have to stay away from bad parents who might infect them and ruin all their good work? This narrator never quite gains our credibility, and therefore, neither does her struggle to have a sexual life as a divorced mother.

Rating:
Summary: very well-written, very romantic (in parts)...
Review: touching, too . . . i really could "feel" for the characters, and what they were going through . . . now want to read more books by the author!

Rating:
Summary: very well-written, very romantic (in parts)...
Review: touching, too . . . i really could "feel" for the characters, and what they were going through . . . now want to read more books by the author!

Rating:
Summary: A balancing act between the reality and fantasy of love. h
Review: WLG opens with a women who bravely leaves her marriage in search of true love. What she finds is that her the reality of love is a compromise of the mundane and ,sometimes, the ridiculous. Her passion propells her into two very different relationships and in the end she is left with a truer sense of herself. Nonethless, her quest for romance and a true connection to someone is fabulous. I couldn't put it down, anyone in a long time relationship should read this.